Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (48 page)

“I don’t know,” Naomi said, “but it
got out of there somehow. It got Vlad, then it must have come over
here...”

“...and when it
was done snacking on the supplies, it dropped down onto the
animals.” Jack shuddered.
Had it dropped a
few more feet to the right
, Jack thought,
sickened,
poor Alexander would’ve been
finished
.

“After that,” Jack said, “Renee said
that both Alexander and Koshka were staring at something up here,
and she thought she saw something go into the air intake
tunnel.”

“Naomi, Jack, I hate to be a
spoilsport, but trying to ferret this thing, whatever it is, out of
that tunnel isn’t going to be a piece of cake. Because it’s not
just a simple tunnel, it’s a three story-high air filtration
complex. There are nooks and crannies in there big enough to hide a
Volkswagen.”

“Could it have already gotten
outside?” Torres asked worriedly.

Naomi shook her head. “No, all the
blast valves are kept closed except when the generators are
running,” she said. “And there aren’t any rubber seals on them for
this thing to eat so it could escape to the outside: it’s all
hardened steel. They were designed to hold back the heat and
overpressure from a nuclear blast, remember?”

“The other minor detail,” Jack said
heavily, “is how do we kill it? It’s not a harvester, at least not
like the ones we know, or the cats would be going berserk more than
they already are with the one cooling its slimy jets in the antenna
silo. If it’s some sort of oozing thing, would our weapons have any
effect on it?”

“Fire?” Hathcock
suggested.

“Maybe,” Naomi answered, frustrated,
“but we just don’t know. And using fire in here isn’t the greatest
idea, anyway.”

Hathcock frowned, but said nothing.
From the look on his face, it was clear that he’d be happy to take
his chances using a flamethrower against whatever new threat they
were facing, and damn-all to the risks.

“So what do we do?” Naomi asked as
she peered down the dozen or so meters of tunnel that led to the
air intake complex. It was well-lit, but the intake and exhaust
tunnels had always made her feel uneasy, even under normal
circumstances.

“Seal up this tunnel,” Jack told
her. “I assume we’ve got some spare metal plating in storage
somewhere in the complex that can be used for repairs?” Hathcock
nodded. “Get a team together and weld some plates over the mouth of
the intake tunnel here. That’ll at least contain whatever-it-is for
now until we can figure out a better solution.”

“What if we have to start the
generators?” Naomi asked. “If we need anything more than battery
power, we’ll have to open the lab dome’s blast door so they can
have access to the air in the rest of the complex. But running them
would asphyxiate us in minutes.”

Turning to her, he said, “Then let’s
just hope we don’t need to run them.”

***

Naomi sat back and rubbed her eyes.
She’d been staring at the screen for what seemed like days, and she
was only upright because of the evil brew of coffee that she had
ordered Renee to keep shoving in front of her. She wanted
desperately to rest, but she had to know what had happened since
they’d left for Spitsbergen, and the only thing that might tell
them was what was in the residue samples she’d taken from the
lab.

“How’s it going?” she heard Jack’s
voice from behind her.

“It’s...strange, Jack,” she said,
turning to look up at him. “Very strange. Let me show you what I’ve
been looking at.

“This is a chromatogram of the
sample of the liquid from the biohazard chamber where the monkey
was kept, telling us how much of which elements are present in the
sample.” She pointed to the screen, which showed what looked like a
chart of vertical spikes of varying height along the horizontal
axis. Jack looked at her blankly. She punched a few commands into
the workstation’s keyboard, and the graph was replaced by a list of
elements: hydrogen, oxygen, and a long list of others, arranged in
alphabetical order, with a number next to each. “Not that it came
as a surprise, but this isn’t a homogeneous sample: it’s a
mish-mash of different compounds, so the readings here are only
telling us what elements are present. But do you notice anything
missing?”

Jack looked down the list, frowning.
“I never claimed to be a chemistry whiz, but I would assume that
carbon should probably be in there somewhere.”

“Bingo,” she said. “There’s no
carbon in this liquid, Jack. None. I’ve run this test several times
already, and there’s not a single carbon atom that I can find in a
liquid that’s otherwise a witch’s brew of nearly everything else,
including traces of several heavy metals that were probably in the
electronics the thing...consumed.”

She hit more keys, and a new graph
appeared, this time with the list of compounds displayed next to
it. A few more keystrokes, and the original list of elements she’d
shown him appeared alongside the new list. “This sample is from the
animal storage area. See anything different?”

His eyes darting from one list to
the other, he said, “The second list is definitely longer, with
more elements listed. And...carbon is there now, along with some
elements that weren’t in the first sample. There’s also a ton of
hydrogen and oxygen. Water, maybe?”

“I’d have to run more tests, but
that’s my first guess,” Naomi told him.

“So, what does all that
mean?”

“I think that whatever we’re dealing
with used up almost everything it came in contact with at the
start, when it was in the biohazard room,” she said slowly. “And
the liquid residues that we found were the things it didn’t need.
It simply flushed them out. In the monkey’s biosafety chamber, the
residue was very viscous and had a limited number of elements,
because the thing needed almost everything it consumed.”

“And by the time it got to the
animals,” Jack interjected, “or after it finished with them, it had
most of what it needed, and flushed out a lot more. It was becoming
saturated?”

Naomi nodded. “I think so.
Everything in the residue it left behind was simply elements and
compounds it didn’t need or couldn’t use.” She sat back. “And all
the missing plastic and rubber makes sense now: those materials
have a very high carbon content. It absorbed all of it, every
single bit, when it first escaped, and by the time it finished with
the animals, it didn’t need any more and flushed out the
excess.”

“But what would it need so much
carbon for?”

She turned to him, looking grim.
“What makes a harvester so hard to kill without fire?”

Jack’s face turned ashen. “Jesus,”
he said quietly. “The thing’s growing a reinforced carbon skeleton,
isn’t it?”

Naomi nodded silently, her eyes
reflecting the glow of the unwelcome revelation shown in the
workstation’s displays.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

“According to the information I’ve
been able to dig up,” Renee told the people gathered in the command
center’s conference room, “the seed is being produced and prepared
for shipment at a newly-constructed building complex about twenty
miles northwest of Lincoln.” An image of the facility appeared,
showing a large central building that looked like a warehouse, and
several smaller support buildings. “They located it here,” the
picture shifted to an overhead image of the area, a patchwork quilt
of green and brown Nebraska farm land, “right between the towns of
Ulysses and Staplehurst. The location is fairly isolated, for what
that may be worth.” She looked around the table, her eyes lingering
on Naomi and Jack. “That’s the good news, such as it is. The bad
news is that they’ve already prepared nearly ten thousand tons, and
it’s going to start shipping tomorrow.”

“What?” Naomi gasped. “How could
they have done that so quickly?”

“I don’t think they did it quickly,
Naomi,” Renee told her. “I couldn’t get past some of the company’s
network firewalls – they’ve really tightened up on that, by the way
– to the information I wanted, but based on the shipping manifests
I was able to find, I think they’ve been preparing this stuff for
at least the last six months. That corresponds with the time they
opened this facility.”

“We just happened to catch them at
LRU as they were about to fold up shop there,” Jack surmised. “They
were already getting the seed ready for production.”

Renee nodded.

There was silence
around the table.
Ten thousand
tons
, Jack thought,
with every single seed representing a potential ecological
disaster
.

“How can we deal with that?” Dr.
Chidambaram interjected. “All of our planning was based on
interrupting the harvesters before they got to this stage, of
destroying the threat before it materialized. Now...ten thousand
tons...”

“Can’t we just burn it?” Jack
asked.

Chidambaram shook his head. “It’s
very difficult to burn closely packed seeds, as these will be, in
bags or in bulk trucks or rail cars,” he said. “Not enough oxygen
can get in to assist in the burning process. Much of the seed would
go untouched.”

“What about a fuel-air explosive,”
Jack asked, “like the harvesters used on the genebanks? That seemed
to work pretty well on them.”

“It is a different situation, Jack,”
Chidambaram explained. “Seeds in the genebanks are generally stored
in small quantities, in separate sealed packets and boxes. There
may be many samples, but they are not closely packed together. With
seeds tightly packed in bags, and thousands of bags stacked
together, a bomb such as you describe would disperse many of the
seeds they have stored in that facility out into the surrounding
fields where they might take root.”

“And we have no idea if any of the
retrovirus particles would be carried away in the smoke,” said one
of the other women in the room, a biologist who had come after
Renee sent out the emergency recall. The woman looked at Naomi. “We
would have to assume at least some of those particles might remain
viable.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to go in
and neutralize it bag by bag,” Naomi said firmly.

“Naomi,” Jack told her, shaking his
head, “that’s impossible. You’re talking, what, a few hundred
thousand bags, figuring a hundred pounds a bag?”

“Four hundred thousand,” Renee
corrected quietly. “Give or take a few.”

“That would take us forever,” Jack
went on, “and the harvesters aren’t going to give us that sort of
time. Look at that,” he pointed to a lighter colored strip
surrounding the facility, and small, squat buildings at the
entrances. “Those are security fences and guard posts. They moved
their operation here because they think it’s secure. We’ll be lucky
if we have an hour before we’ve got a cage dropping around us,
assuming we can force our way in there in the first
place.”

“There’s no other way, Jack,” Naomi
told him stubbornly. “There’s just no other way to be sure that
they’re destroyed.”

“Yes, there is,” Jack said after a
long pause. He was looking down at the table now, careful to avoid
Naomi’s gaze.

Everyone, including Naomi, stared at
him.

“Spill it, Jack,” Renee said
bluntly.

He looked over at Chidambaram and
said, “A nuke would do it, wouldn’t it?”

“For God’s sake, Jack!” Naomi
blurted. “You can’t be serious!”

“Would a nuke work?” Jack pressed,
staring now at Chidambaram, who was distinctly
uncomfortable.

“Yes,” the group’s leading
agricultural expert admitted. “The heat and radiation would come as
close as we humanly could to completely destroying even that
quantity of seed, and the retrovirus particles, even with a small
explosive yield, but...” He held out his hands in a gesture of
helplessness. “Jack, you cannot set off a nuclear weapon in the
middle of the country!”

“Jack–” Naomi began
angrily.

“
Listen!
”
Jack shouted, silencing her and shocking the others. “The only way
we have of stopping this is to destroy those seeds, right?
Right?
” Heads slowly
nodded around the table. “Looking at Renee’s research and our
discussion here, we’ve already eliminated just about every other
means we have that might work, either because we can’t be sure the
seeds will be completely destroyed or because we just won’t have
time. Right?” More grudging nods, except from Naomi. She stared
fixedly at the wall on the opposite side of the room. “People,
we’re running out of options.” He looked again at Chidambaram.
“Doctor, I’ve fought for and bled for this country,” he told him,
“and the last thing I would ever do is put any of its people in
harm’s way. But if that’s the only option we have, then that’s the
one we have to take.”

“Aren’t you forgetting one minor
detail?” Naomi said, turning to glare at him. “This may be an old
missile base, but they didn’t happen to leave any nukes lying
around here when they closed it up. Where do you think you’re going
to find a nuclear weapon? The local hardware store?”